W. L. Morgan, Finance Pioneer, Dies at 100

Walter L. Morgan, a pioneer of finance who founded an early mutual fund that sailed through the booms and busts of seven decades, died on Wednesday at Bryn Mawr Hospital in Pennsylvania. He was 100 and lived in Bryn Mawr.

Mr. Morgan headed the Wellington Fund for 42 years until he retired in 1970. The fund, which later became a mainstay of the Vanguard Group, started with $100,000 pooled by a handful of Morgan relatives and Pennsylvania business people, and it grew into one of the nation's biggest mutual funds, with $23 billion in assets and 900,000 shareholders.

As a young accountant in the boom years before the 1929 stock market crash, Mr. Morgan put together an assortment of stocks, bonds and government securities that he thought would be less risky than competing funds that were borrowing money and concentrating on stocks at wildly inflated prices.

''There was so much speculation, and stocks were just too high'' before the 1929 break in prices, he recalled in an interview with the Vanguard newsletter last summer. Mr. Morgan's fund, originally called the Industrial and Power Securities Company, sold United States Steel at $258 a share and watched the stock plummet to $24 as the Depression set in, he recalled.

He renamed the fund in 1935 for the Duke of Wellington, the 19th-century British general who defeated Napoleon. ''Words like 'industrials' and 'power' sort of fell out of favor with investors after the crash,'' he said.

In 1951, he hired John C. Bogle, a fellow Princeton University alumnus, and eventually made him his successor at Wellington. They had met when Mr. Bogle was an undergraduate writing a thesis on the tiny and contentious mutual fund industry of that era.

Mr. Bogle went on to found the Vanguard Group of mutual funds. Vanguard named its main building in Valley Forge, Pa., for Mr. Morgan as part of a celebration of his 100th birthday in July. Seven thousand employees in the company's American and foreign offices signed birthday cards. Mr. Morgan had continued to work twice a week at his Vanguard office until he broke a hip last winter, said Michael Robinson, a longtime associate.

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A native of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Mr. Morgan attended the Hillman Academy and was the last surviving member of the Princeton class of 1920. After graduation, he studied accounting and for a time was the youngest certified public accountant in Pennsylvania. But he bridled at his paycheck, starting at $28 a week with a big accounting firm.

''When I asked for a raise, my boss told me he wasn't particularly smitten with my work,'' Mr. Morgan said in the interview last summer. He joined another firm and helped wealthy people prepare their tax returns. ''It didn't take me long to realize that they needed investment counsel as well as tax advice,'' he said.

In 1942, he married Helen Dugan of Bryn Mawr, who survives.

A football fan, Mr. Morgan contributed to the cost of a new stadium that will be dedicated at Princeton on Sept. 19, and he financed several scholarships.

He was a trout fisherman and liked to hunt with his favorite English setter, Ticker Tape, on his farm near Allentown, Pa.

Mr. Morgan restored and supported the historic Morgan House, which was built by an ancestor, Edward Morgan, in 1695 in Kulpsville, Pa. Other relatives included Daniel Boone, a grandson of Edward Morgan, and Daniel Morgan, who fought in the Revolutionary War. He was an eighth-generation descendant of an early Welsh colonist with family ties to David Rittenhouse and other well-known regional families.

He was a music fan with eclectic tastes that included Dixieland and Wagner. He was an honorary director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. He also collected antique furniture and fine wines and was a member of the Commanderie de Bordeaux, a French wine society.